Out of the box, the WordPress custom fields are a bit awkward; users have to manually add them to each post, and the values are only tracked in text fields. For users who are comfortable using WordPress, this is doable, though annoying and a bit convoluted; for those less comfortable, it can be extremely confusing.

The Custom Field Template allows you to create a ‘form’ out of the different custom fields you’d like to display on posts. Each of these forms group the different values together; you can also restrict a form template to only show for a specific post type (post, page or a custom type), a specific template, or even specific posts by ID.

One item I frequently use custom fields for is creating profiles on websites – for example, the profiles on the Stem website each have custom fields behind the scenes to help manage the data about each Stemployee and make customizing displays possible.

Here is the data for my profile, using the out-of-the-box custom fields:

Not too bad, actually. But what if a new profile was needed for the site? This is what the custom fields would look like in that case:

WordPress does save keys that have been used before for custom fields, which is great… as long as you have an idea what each of them does. It is functional, but hardly self-explanatory — I’d feel fine managing data like this myself, but would feel awful handing it over to someone else without detailed instructions. At this time, months after setting up those various custom fields, I can’t even remember what half of them are used for.

Enter the Custom Field Templates

Now here are the exact same custom fields, using the Custom Field Template plugin:

The Custom Field Template uses its own simple shortcodes to create form fields for custom field data — here is a shot of the Custom Field Template UI to give you an idea of what it looks like:

The Custom Field Templates can be set to use simple text inputs, like above; it’s also possible to use checkboxes:

Here is a quick example of the Custom Field Template plugin in action on Stem’s Lawblogs.ca directory. I’ve created a fake entry for the Greenhouse blog, and entered the details into the fields that were created (complete with several questionable Clawbies wins):

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also incorporate PHP code into the Custom Field Template — unfortunately, this feature doesn’t have a lot of documentation, but if you know a bit of PHP it can be worth fiddling around with as you can add some handy automation. In my opinion, this is what really pushes this plugin from ‘helpful’ to ‘invaluable’ — I’ll be covering some examples of PHP we’ve paired with this plugin in the weeks to come.

Do you have a plugin that you can’t build websites without? Please share in the comments below!

Confession: after reading Douglas Coupland’s excellent novel Microserfs, I made a pilgrimage with some friends to Seattle (well, Redmond, more specifically) to visit the Microsoft campus. Laurel was one of my fellow pilgrims and captured our adventures for posterity.

I’m far from a Microsoft devotee, but being there, in the place where so much household name software was developed, seemed extremely culturally significant.

So, I was totally fascinated to hear that the Googleplex will soon be seen on the silver screen in a forthcoming movie called “The Internship“. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land sums up the plots like this: “The movie is about two older men who know nothing about computers who recently lose their jobs. They decide to try to get a job at Google by interning there first.” While some of the filming was done on a pseudo-Google set in Atlanta, they also filmed at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

Unfortunately, IMHO, the trailer is not even close to funny, so I don’t have high hopes for this film. But just as I eventually caved and watched “The Social Network”, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I succumb to my curiosity about the inner workings – albeit imagined ones – of Google. Are you excited for “The Internship”?

I totally identified with Mary Ellen Bates’ thoughts on whether handwriting has become obsolete. She relays that children aren’t required to learn cursive in school anymore; instead, they now learn to type. Yikes! Although I learned to write in cursive when I was young, I admit I have never had nice handwriting. Like Mary Ellen,

“…my penmanship is so bad that I print my handwritten notes, and my signature looks like the scrawl of a third grader. But I still swoon when I see nice handwriting and dream of one day having the time to practice my cursive writing. Yes, I’m a nerd.”

In fact, it’s not just my cursive that looks ridiculous, it’s any writing I do on paper. While I used to journal by hand and write letters to friends, these days those have been replaced by blogging and emails. I am a semi-decent typist, but I physically write so rarely nowadays that it’s no wonder my handwriting is so atrocious. When I do sit down to physically write for any length of time, my hand gets tired embarrassingly quickly.

And I’ll admit my spelling skills have taken a giant hit, too. As a child, I was a good enough speller to make it into the city-wide spelling bee, but today, WordPress has alerted me to three misspellings in this post alone. Let’s pretend they were all typos, though 😉

At one of the law firms I used to work at, there was an articling student (who went on to become an associate) who freely and frequently sent hand-written thank-you notes to anyone who’d done something nice for him. There were people who teased him (lightheartedly, for the most part), but hey, I still remember the guy because of this, almost a decade later. Cursive or not, hand-written notes are rare these days — rarer still in law firms — and it was such a small, but thoughtful action; a tangible, personal expression of gratitude and connection. It’s always nice to receive a thank-you note, but hand-written ones really stand out.

What is lost when we stop writing on paper and committing spelling rules to heart, and start focusing entirely on a screen, typing skills, and built-in dictionaries? It doesn’t bode well. According to the WSJ article that Bates cites,

“Typing doesn’t help the brain develop as much as writing in longhand, a tactile means of expression with roots in scratching on cave walls, argues handwriting analyst Michelle Dresbold. With typing, the fingers make repetitive movements rather than connect shapes, she said.

“It’s a very natural process to take a crayon or a rock and make symbols with your hand,” Ms. Dresbold said. “It’s just bringing down things from your brain.” Without that, “children are not thinking as thoroughly.””

The only way to reclaim these skills is to practice. Maybe I’ll dig out a paper journal and practice my cursive tonight.

GenerateWP allows you to generate code for your WordPress theme using simple forms. I’m not sure how much help it would be to someone unfamiliar with theme development or PHP (simply because troubleshooting the code itself could still be necessary), but I’ve found it very handy in creating snippets for functions.php files without having to dig around in the WordPress Codex for code examples.

Some of the code you can create includes functions for custom taxonomies, custom posttypes, post statuses and even snippets for your wp-config.php file. As you’re filling out forms to generate the code, it’s also a great way to make sure all the function variables are accounted for — for me, that means not forgetting important elements that help users, like updating all of the page labels for custom post types.

I know animated gifs are Laurel’s beat here on the Greenhouse, but this was too cool not to share… Giphy is a new search engine for locating animated gifs.

The content is a tad light, and there’s nothing remotely useful (yet) for our friends in the legal market. However, TPMIdealab reports the fledgling website had 30K visitors in their first weekend of operation. That sounds like a fantastic start, and something that deserves a pat on the back. As web workers ourselves, we like people who try new things!

And besides, finding gems like the picture below isn’t always that easy.

This week’s WordPress Wednesday is just a quick reminder that WP 3.5.1 was released late last week.

The latest WordPress update is a maintenance and security release; although no new features have been added, these upgrades are just as important as they fix any issues that may have been introduced with the new features, and security problems that have been found in the software.

In this week’s WordPress Wednesday, we’re going to cover how to change the visual and text editor typefaces in WordPress.

Changing the WYSIWYG Editor Typeface

Customizing the WYSIWYG editor’s fonts can be very helpful — it can give anyone writing for the website a chance to see (roughly) what their content will look like on the front-end of the site. Customizing the editor styles can also give you an opportunity to increase legibility and making editing text easier.

The WYSIWYG view of the WordPress editor is loaded in an iframe, so any custom CSS can be applied by uploading a CSS file in the site’s active theme, and referencing that file from the theme’s functions.php. The path to the CSS file should be relative to the functions.php file, so if the editor CSS is called ‘editor-style.css’ and it is in the root of the current theme, you would link to it like so:

You can find out more information about custom stylesheets for WordPress’s WYSIWYG editor on the Codex.

Changing the HTML Editor Font in WordPress 3.3+

Changing the typeface of the HTML view of the editor is a little different. This view of the editor is simply loaded as a textarea in the WordPress UI. This means a separate stylesheet is not necessary; instead, the styles will need to be written to the top of the page.

This example is from WPDailyBits — simply copy and paste the code into your functions.php file:

[php] add_action( 'admin_head-post.php', 'wpdb_fix_html_editor_font' ); add_action( 'admin_head-post-new.php', 'wpdb_fix_html_editor_font' ); function wpdb_fix_html_editor_font() { ?> In the above example, we’ve switched the editor’s code view to use the font-face helvetica at 15px; you can change these values to whatever you like.

Outside of the typical fixes and tweaks, the Media Manager in WordPress have been completely overhauled. WP 3.5 also includes the most recent version of the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor, jQuery and SimplePie. You can find a more detailed list of what else has been updated in the WordPress Codex.

As always, make sure to backup your database and files before running the upgrade!

I always look forward to a new edition of Google Zeitgeist, the search engine’s annual release of most popular queries. Not only is it simply fascinating, it’s also a lot of fun to scan through the lists and see how in touch you are with popular culture.

In this year’s edition there is both “trending” and “most searched” data available for countries around the world across a wide variety of topics and when you look at certain sets, you just know the Googlers who work on this project have a ton of fun with it.

For instance, Canada’s data set includes beauties like this:

Canadian Food

(didn’t know we owned the rights to bacon, and am slightly distressed that Yorkshire pudding – a traditional British dish not typically associated with Canada – beat out Nanaimo bars, but I’ll live!) and this:

Craft Beer

Switzerland’s lists feature the most searched mountain peaks, the UK has most searched Royal family members (the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s dog Lupo makes the top 10; Camilla does not), and the US has a series of lists on fad diets, body exercise and calorie searches. The “How to” and “What is” lists for each country are worth a read, too.

If this sort of thing is as interesting to you as it is to me, be prepared to get sucked into the 125-page report…. fire up an extra browser tab and get ready to look up all the terms you’ve never heard of!

Ever wonder how much gas carrying an extra penny in your vehicle’s coin tray uses up? How much food cows would require if they could photosynthesize? How about how long the sun would last if a giant water hose was spraying on it?

Well, you need to check out What If?, a site ‘answering your hypothetical questions with physics’ by Randall Munroe, creator of the brilliant webcomic xkcd. Munroe does a great job answering the above questions and more using a combination of humour, drawings, diagrams and a boat-load of math.

If you need a little break this Friday, I highly recommend you check it out!